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Just for fun: (Looks like the wild horses are a better solution.)
The following information validates some of the information I learned from Colonel Towner.
Rough Transcript from an Economic Times video. 15 minutes
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: What did you learn about MK Naomi, and do you believe its activities were even more serious than what we know about MK Ultra?
Dr Kinzer: The MK Ultra project was aimed at seizing control of the minds of individuals. The Army was interested in something different, which was trying to use biological agents in warfare against entire populations. So, MK Naomi is the place where these two goals overlap.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: Did you find direct documentation between Paperclip scientists and the development of MK Ultra’s experimental protocols, specifically the use of mescaline, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation?
Dr Kinzer: I found what I think might be the first secret CIA prison or black site. It’s a nice chalet in Germany. These were the cells where the MK Ultra officers, working side by side with Nazis, uh carried out those gruesome experiments.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: These experiments were happening after the Nuremberg trials, correct? So, the CIA would have known that these were crimes against humanity. Um my first question is for Mr. O’Neill. MK Naomi, the joint CIA Army program that ran parallel with MK Ultra at Fort Detrick, appears to have been run with deliberate minimal documentation. Um Army records on Special Operations Division have apparently been destroyed. In your investigation, what did you learn about MK Naomi, and do you believe its activities were even more serious than what we know about MK Ultra?
Mr. O’Neill: I’m sorry. I didn’t learn anything about those operations. I kept my focus mostly on Dr. West and his work. I do know that the only reason I found the documents I found was cuz Dr. West accidentally left them in his papers, and he probably did that because he corresponded with Gottlieb under Gottlieb’s assigned alias, which was Sherman Grifford, and he addressed all his mail to a post office box here under Foss Cut Corporation.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: Thank you, Mr. I’m just going to real quick go to Dr. Kinzer. Are you aware of anything that exists with MK Naomi in your research? And if you could please press the button.
Dr Kinzer: My understanding My understanding of MK Naomi is that it was a joint project between the military and the CIA. And there’s a big difference because the MK Ultra project was aimed [music] at seizing control of the minds of individuals. The army was interested in something different, which was trying to use biological agents in warfare against entire populations. So, MK Naomi is the place where these two goals overlapped.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: And that was the 1953 Frank Olson death. Was that in a way tied to that? from some chatter that we had seen in
Dr Kinzer: Exactly what the motivation was behind the decision about Frank Olson, if there was such a decision, is unknown.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: My next question is also for you, sir. Operation Paperclip brought over 1,600 German scientists into the United States government after World War II, including individuals who had conducted human experimentation in concentration camps. The CIA and military were aware of their backgrounds and recruited them anyways. In your research, did you find direct documentation between Paperclip scientists and the development of MK Ultra’s experimental protocols, specifically the use of mescaline, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation, which were techniques also documented at Dachau?
Dr Kinzer: Absolutely. Um Kurt Blome, who was the chief of biological weapons development for the Nazi government, came to work for the CIA. So did Walter Schreiber, who was the surgeon general of the Nazi army. Um I can just tell a a brief story. When I was researching my book, I found what I think might be the first secret CIA prison or black site. It’s a nice chalet in Germany. And the guy who now owns it took me into the basement. He said these were the cells where the MK Ultra officers, working side by side with Nazis, uh carried out those gruesome experiments, which were actually just continuations of the experiments that those Nazis had been conducting just a few years earlier right down the road.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: Just for timeline and clarification, these experiments were happening after the Nuremberg trials, correct? So, the CIA would have known that these were crimes against humanity.
Dr Kinzer: [4:20] I looked for an episode in which the Nuremberg doctrines were posted on the wall in some MK Ultra or CIA office, and I was never able to find any indication that those Nuremberg principles ever were even consulted, much less obeyed.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: Thank you. My next question would be for either witness to comment, Dr. Kinzer or Mr. O’Neill. Both witnesses have written about the site psychiatrist Louis Jolly West. Sydney Gottlieb ran MK Ultra program for the CIA, hired West as a contractor to conduct research for sub-project 43, combining hypnotism, drugs, and sensory deprivation to create dis-associative states in which, to quote Mr. Kinzer in his book Poisoner in Chief, the human mind could be pulled away from its moorings. Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, West psychiatrically examined Jack Ruby, then in prison for murdering… Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin accused um of murdering President Kennedy. A report emerged from West’s examination said that Ruby had suffered an acute psychotic break. Can you explain why Dr. West in particular was chosen to conduct an examination of Jack Ruby alone in his jail cell with no other psychologist present?
Mr O’Neill: Be happy to. West inserted himself into the case of Ruby.. the day after the shooting, West approached the judge in the preliminary hearings and asked to be assigned to the case. He was refused by the judge. After Ruby was convicted at his first trial, an associate of West, Dr. Hubert Winston Smith, who was a psychiatrist and an attorney, took over Ruby’s defense for his appeal, and he had already discussed appointing.. West to the case. And as you said, West examined Ruby alone at the jail cell and emerged to announce that in the preceding 48 hours he had had a acute psychotic break from which he would never recover. He had been declared incompetent to stand trial in his the first time by a panel of I think eight psychiatrists. This psychotic break lasted until his death in 1967. Two months after West examined him, Ruby testified for the first time, and only time to the Warren Commission, and it was the first time he ever publicly was supposed to say what his reasons were for his shooting Oswald. The testimony had to be halted cuz he was babbling incoherently. As Allen Inspector, who was a counsel to the commission, wrote in his memoirs, he pulled him aside and said that they were cutting off the arms and legs of children in Albuquerque and El Paso, and he said he was making no sense whatsoever. West in his letters to Gottlieb from 1953 discussed experiments where he would induce specific mental disorders in people without their awareness. A year before the Kennedy assassination, he publicly spoke in Oklahoma City and talked about his LSD experiments inducing psychiatric breaks and psychosis in people with the use of LSD, which he of course later contradicted, when he told the New York Times he never used LSD in animal experimentation.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: What an interesting connection. I might have time but I’ll be now recognizing Mr. Burlison from Missouri for 5 minutes.
[7:54]
Mr. Burlison: Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you for your diligent work on this and hopefully we will hear back from the CIA on those boxes of documents that have so many questions about. Dr. Kinzer and Mr. O’Neill the CIA created MK Ultra in 1953 supposedly out of fear that the Soviet Union and China had developed mind control capabilities. Let me go back a little bit further. So one of my questions has to do with the event that happened in 1951 in August in France. There was a bakery that I guess the people that lived in that community over 250 some say 300 people were poisoned from the bread. It was determined that that was LSD that was causing all of these people to hallucinate. Some people died. Is there any connection Dr. Kinzer to that event and was that something that either inspired the MK Ultra program or the MK Naomi program or is that something that we were involved in even that early on?
Dr Kinzer: I would turn that question back to you. I don’t think anybody really knows the full story of what happened at that time in that town in France. That the United States could have been involved, that this could have been part of what was then called Operation Artichoke, the predecessor for MK Ultra seems to me not beyond the realm of possibility. There’s a lot of overlap between the ergot enzyme that is the basis of LSD and certain rye and wheat fungus that can be used in breads. Was that something intentional? Was it something the Americans were involved in? I have my suspicions, but just based on my background as a journalist, I don’t operate on suspicions. So, I would love to see more investigation of that episode.
…..
Comment on Ergot Poisoning. It is worth a quick look because it describes the symptoms.
Debunking the “Moldy Bread” Theory – Salem Witch Museum
In her excellent lecture “The Salem Witch Trials and Ergot, the ‘Moldy Bread’ Hypothesis,” historian Margot Burns describes a conversation with Linnda Caporael about the publication of this article.
…..
Mr. Burlison: My next question has to do with once the program began. I think one of the most shocking things that we determined is that Operation Midnight Climax that occurred in the early 1950s, ’60s, where the CIA had safe houses. And there was Dr. Kinzer, I mean this obviously extremely disturbing behavior that was happening where you had American citizens who were being lured into these brothels and then dosed with a hallucinogenic and then filmed during their sex acts. Was there anyone prosecuted for this for these crimes?
Dr Kinzer: No, there have been no prosecutions for any crime related to MKUltra as far as I know. To me, the remarkable aspect of Operation Midnight Climax was that there wasn’t even the pretense of scientific experimentation. The person watching behind the one-way mirror was a grossly overweight drug officer sitting on a portable toilet and drinking cocktails out of a pitcher. There was nobody there that was a scientist or somebody who had understood sexual behavior or human psychology. So, there was no science involved in it at all. I can add a little footnote. When I was researching Poisoner in Chief, I came across a document in which one of the officers involved in setting up that program, Operation Midnight Climax, said that Sidney Gottlieb himself used to fly from Washington out to inspect the project regularly and always asked that women be provided for him. So…. [Interrupts]
Mr. Burlison: That was my next question. Do you think that the agents were involved in the sexual encounters?
Dr Kinzer: Well, could that have actually been the reason why the bordello was opened? There was no prospect of any serious scientific result out of that project given the personnel who were overseeing it. So, those CIA officers, particularly Gottlieb, involved in overseeing Operation Midnight Climax, certainly were able to take advantage of what it offered.
Mr. Burlison: Thank you. And my my last question, first I want to say thank you to Mr. O’Neill. The book Chaos, I checked it out from the Library of Congress. and [I] greatly appreciate your work there. I was intrigued by one of the statements that you made based on your research that the MKUltra program, they were actually successfully able to replace memories. And because of that, I’m wondering if And Dr. Kinzer, you can chime in if you have any knowledge of this. Did the program continue? And do you think that the program in some aspect is still continuing today?
Mr O’Neill: You’re asking if the program continued after 1973 when it was halted supposedly. That’s a question I’m asked at almost every appearance I do. Is it happening today? Did it continue? I don’t know. I can’t imagine that it didn’t though because the technology that they worked to establish over 20, 25 years and spent more money on than any operation the CIA ever conducted was successful. I imagine it’s being used. I have no evidence of it being used, so it’s a complete assumption.
Dr Kinzer: I would just add that one of the letters to which Mr. O’Neill referred contains a quote from Mr. Gottlieb saying that these experiments were necessary quote in these times. I think it’s important to put yourself back in that mindset where the United States felt that it was under such overwhelming threat that the loss of a few lives or a few hundred lives was a small price to pay. Commitment to a great cause is one of the most fundamental justifications for committing immoral acts, and patriotism is among the most noble of causes. It can be twisted, and it can be used as an excuse to carry out research under the guise that this is simply research we’re doing to protect ourselves against others, and I think that is a mindset that may still be active in some parts of our government.
Mr. Burlison: Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, Madam Chair. My time has expired. I yield back.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
FULL MKULTRA HEARING: 1 hour 27 minutes
The House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held a hearing entitled, “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.”
INTRODUCTION:
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: Task force on declassification of federal secrets will come to order. Welcome everyone. Without objection, the chair may declare a recess at any time.
I recognize myself for the purpose of making an opening statement. This hearing is about the crimes committed by the Central Intelligence Agency against the American citizens and the decades of secrecy used to conceal them. The American people deserve a complete and truthful record. The victims and their families deserve acknowledgment, and this Congress has a constitutional obligation to ensure that full declassification is not delayed any longer. Project MK Ultra was not a policy failure or an overzealous program that got out of hand. It was a deliberate systematic governmental operation that subjected American citizens, prisoners, hospital patients, veterans, ordinary people to LSD, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, psychological torture without their knowledge or consent. This went on for 20 years on American soil, funded by American taxpayer dollars, and authorized by the very top of US intelligence apparatus. And this program, when it did end, the men who ran it did not cooperate with investigators. They did not come forward. They committed another crime. They destroyed evidence.
The documents this task force has reviewed are unambiguous. In January 1973, the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, prepared to leave office. He personally ordered the destruction of MK Ultra records. The CIA official document in writing states, “Over my stated objectives, the MK Ultra files were destroyed by the order of DCI Mr. Helms shortly before his departure from office. A separate internal account confirms that Helms telephoned Dr. Gottlieb directly and instructed him to destroy quote all files pertaining to drug research and associated activities. Gottlieb compiled. Four people spent an entire day tearing burning down 152 files. Then Gottlieb had his personal papers destroyed by his secretary before he retired. The head of the CIA own records center protested the destruction in writing, but he was overruled. That is obstruction of justice. That is criminal destruction of federal records.
And neither individuals were ever charged with a crime for it. Helms received a $2,000 fine for lying to Congress about an unrelated manner and collected his government pension until he died. Gottlieb retired in rural Virginia and wrote poetry. No one went to prison.
No victim was ever formally compensated by the government for the harm that they caused. By 1975, the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission had already established through sworn testimony and the surviving 1963 Inspector General report that MK Ultra existed and that the CIA had run a program of human experimentation on unwitting Americans. The scope and detail of what we know today is largely because of an accident. In 1977, an archivist diligently complying with a foyer request discovered seven boxes of MK Ultra financial records that had been misfiled and escaped the bonfire. Those seven boxes included the names of institutions, the name of sub projects, the researchers who participated, the specific operation that the CIA had funded, and without them, the vast majority of MK Ultra would only be a rumor, just as Helms and Gottlieb intended. Those seven boxes revealed the MK Ultra comprised at least 149 sub projects, operated across more than 80 institutions, and involved 185 non-government researchers.
They revealed that the CIA covertly contributed $375,000 to a hospital research wing, which was approved directly by DCI Allen Dulles, with Richard Helms concurrence, so the agency could use unwitting patients as experimental subjects in what their own documents called a hospital safe house. The CIA’s own inspector general said in 1963, his classified report concluded that the program had exceeded the agency’s legal chapter and covert testing on unwitting subjects placed the rights and interests of US citizens in jeopardy. The program ran for a decade that we know of and they ignored their own watchdog.
Let me be clear [about] what I believe that we are dealing with here. Administering drugs to people without their knowledge or consent, subjecting humans to psychological torture and using prisoners and hospital patients as nonconsenting research subjects. These are crimes against humanity. The Central Intelligence Agency committed them and then the director of the CIA ordered the destruction of evidence. Today we will hear from two witnesses who have spent years unraveling the cover up that our government ordered. Steven Kzer documented the life and crimes of Sydney Gottlieb in his uh book prisoner of chief and Tom O’Neill spent over 20 years investigating what the CIA buried and what they obscured that in my mind constitutes some of the worst notorious crimes against humanity in the 20th century. Their persistence in the research in this hearing is possible simply because they are patriots. The American people deserve the complete record. The victims and their families deserve acknowledgment, accountability, and justice. And this Congress has a constitutional obligation to make sure that the CIA never does this again.
With that, I’m going to be opening up first questions, and I’ll hold my question to the end, to Representative Berles. Before I do pass it, I did want to just note a few weeks ago, we did receive reports. There was some back and forth regarding the CIA and ODI pertaining to new MK Ultra boxes that were discovered. Myself and Representative Berles did go down to Langley. We did meet with the CIA and the CIA is currently in the process of declassifying newly found documentation. although the documents, and I feel comfortable enough to share it here, pertain specifically to a forgery program that was being housed under MK Ultra. So as soon as those files are released, we will be putting out notification with your help to also comb through some of the newly released documents, but I did want to give you a quick update.
There were three witnesses:
Dr Elizabet Ginexi,
independent Consultant and former Senior Program officer at the National Institute of Health
Dr Kinzer author of: Poisoner in Chief, Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA’s Search for Mind Control
Mr. O’Neill author of: Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret history of the 60s
At 8 minutes Dr Stephen Kinszer’s opening statement.
Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. Let me begin by expressing my gratitude to this task force for confronting the enormous issue of over classification of government documents and the culture of secrecy that enables it. I’m especially gratified by your interest in MK Ultra, the project the CIA carried out through the 1950s in an attempt to find the secret of mind control. MK Ultra was one of the most secret government programs in American history. The chemist who directed it, Sydney Gottlieb, lived in total anonymity. My book, Poisoner and Chief, may be the most complete account of MK Ultra that exists in public, but I’m painfully aware that I have discovered only a small portion of what MK Ultra was and what Sydney Gottlieb did. In 1951, the CIA hired Gottlieb and directed him to launch what became MK Ultra. Gottlieb believed that in order to find a way to implant a new mind into someone’s brain, you first had to find a way to destroy the mind that was in there already.
In its search for ways to destroy a human mind and body, MK Ultra conducted the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been carried out by a US government agency. By any standard, they qualify as medical torture. These experiments took place in prisons, clinics, and safe houses in the United States, in Europe, in Asia, and even in Latin America. Officers of MK Ultra were authorized to travel to foreign countries, preferably those under formal or informal US occupation, and ask the local CIA station to provide them with expendables, human beings who would not be missed if they disappeared. Gottlieb had what amounted to a license to kill issued by the US government. Neither the number of MK Ultra victims nor the number of those who were experimented to death is known.
Gottlieb as a result of this license to kill might have been the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century. Some information about MK Ultra spilled out during the 1970s, but senior CIA officers had intentionally let Gottlieb operate without supervision. So they were able to claim that they knew nothing about his excesses. This was a way for the CIA to deny its institutional role in MK Ultra and to portray it misleadingly as the product of one man’s sadism or excessive zeal. Investigating MK Ultra is challenging because when Gottlieb and his mentor Richard Helms left the CIA in 1973, they illegally ordered that its records be destroyed. Soon afterwards, under DCI Stansfield Turner, a CIA analyst, as you pointed out, Madame Chairman, discovered a cache of MK Ultra documents hidden among financial records. Turner credited that analyst with doing a very diligent job of Sherlock Holmesing. That same diligence I believe could bring results today.
One of the great mysteries of MK Ultra has to do with the death in 1953 of an MK Ultra scientist Frank Olsen who had announced his intention to quit the project. His plunge from a New York hotel room was described in the press as the suicide of an army scientist. He was not an army scientist. He worked for the CIA and evidence suggests that his death may have not have been a suicide. So there could be hidden documents that could illuminate this case.
I would also point out that in addition to searching for unknown documents, this committee could do a tremendous service by simply asking for the end of redactions on the documents that we now have. There are reams of documents about MK Ultra that have heavy sections redacted. In the 1970s, this was justified by the argument that it had only been 20 years since these terrible things had happened and revealing details might affect national security. Now, 70 years have passed. That argument can no longer be valid. So, I would urge this committee to try to fill out all the blank spaces in the documents that we have because we know that is there. This task force could also consider trying to determine whether some new incarnation of MK Ultra exists today. When the main phase of MK Ultra drew to a close in the early 1960s, Sydney Gottlieb concluded that it had failed. That in fact there is no such thing as mind control. Even if he was right, however, he may have been right only at that time. In the many decades since then, there have been enormous advances in cyber technology, in artificial intelligence, in neuroscience. Covert agencies may have access now to tools for mind control that Sydney Gottlieb could not even have imagined. It may well have been true in 1963 that mind control is a myth, but whether it’s still true is uncertain. And that question of whether mind control might now be possible under our new circumstances is something that has presumably occurred to scientists who work for secret services, including our own.
This task force has a chance to connect the past to the future. A renewed effort to find MK Ultra documents from the 1950s and to fill out the redactions of those that have been released might shed new light on how the CIA operated during that period. It could also inform a new inquiry into whether any mind control projects are now underway inside the US security apparatus that might help prevent the emergence of a 21st century MK Ultra that could be even more destructive than the original. Thank you.
Tom O’Neill’s opening statement.
Thank you, Chairwoman Luna and members of the committee. It’s a privilege to be here today. Almost 50 years ago, the last congressional hearings into MK Ultra took place just a short walk from here in the Dirks Senate Office Building. At those hearings convened in August and September of 1977, representatives of the CIA told Congress and the American people that its 25-year effort to control human behavior had been a colossal failure. I believe Congress was never told the truth about what this program actually achieved. In fact, I believe the agency misled Congress in 1977 when it characterized MK Ultra as a failure. My name is Tom O’Neill and in 1999 I accepted a magazine assignment to write a story about murders committed by a group of hippies called the Manson family. For those unfamiliar with this horrific episode of American history, in the summer of 1969, four young people acting on the orders of a cult leader named Charles Manson, went to the home of movie director Roman Polanski and murdered everyone they found there, including his eight and a half month pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate. The victims were complete strangers to their killers. The following night, Manson’s followers murdered another couple in the same grizzly fashion. At the time I accepted the assignment, I’d never heard of MK Ultra, and I wouldn’t for another two years. After I’d missed countless deadlines, lost the assignment, and fall fallen down a nightmarish rabbit hole trying to answer the question I couldn’t quite shake. How had Manson, a barely literate ex-con, acquired the ability to persuade ordinary young people to murder complete strangers simply because he had told them to?
The pursuit of the answer to that question led me to Dr. Lewis Jolian West, known to his friends as Jolly. West was one of the most influential psychiatrists in America. During his career, he crossed paths with some of the most controversial events of the 20th century, including the Patty Hurst kidnapping case and the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination investigation. In 1977, West was one of seven academic researchers named in a front page New York Times story alleging that the CIA had used American universities, hospitals, and prisons as secret laboratories for experiments involving LSD and other drugs on unwitting human subjects. West vigorously denied the allegations. He acknowledged that the agency had approached him but insisted he had refused because he said LSD was too dangerous and unpredictable to be used on humans. He added that he limited all of his research with LSD to animals. The revelations in the Times led directly to the congressional hearings held later that year. West denials, however, were effective. He was never investigated and his name never came up at the hearings.
I’ll spare you the long and tedious story of how my Manson reporting led me to West except to say that I eventually learned that in 1967 when Manson transformed into the cult leader we are familiar with today, he and his followers were receiving free medical care at a clinic in San Francisco where West had established a base of operations for a research project he was conducting nearby. After becoming intrigued by the allegations against West, I learned that UCLA, his last academic home, had inherited his paper following his death in 1999.
Nearly two months and more than 200 boxes later, I found the proverbial needle in a hay stack, correspondence between West and Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, the architect of MK Ultra. The letters begin in 1953, just two months after CIA director Alan Dulles authorized the program and while West was stationed at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, where he was chief chief psychiatrist at the base hospital. In his first letter to Gottlieb, West proposed conducting experiments on unwitting human subjects, including military personnel, prisoners, and psychiatric patients at the base hospital. He then outlined the experiments themselves in six more pages that could have been written by Josef Mengele Using LSD in combination with hypnosis, West purposed inducing confusion, amnesia, and specific mental disorders in people who would remember nothing of their interaction with him afterward. He sought to develop techniques to extract true information and implant false information in unwilling subjects and to alter the attitudes and beliefs of quote previously loyal individuals. In other words, to completely switch their allegiance from one group or leader to another.
But it was another sentence at the end of that letter that stopped me cold. These experiments, he wrote, must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field. Gottlieb’s response could hardly have been more enthusiastic. My good friend, he wrote, I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real. You have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. West replied that there was no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times. There was another document in West papers that had even more significant implications. It was a 14-page report that West wrote in 1956, just three years after he contracted with the CIA. In the report, West described administering LSD and other drugs in conjunction with hypnosis on unwitting human subjects. And then he made a remarkable claim. He announced that he had learned how to replace true memories with false memories on people without their knowledge. In other words, he clarified, it has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and through hypnotic suggestion bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different fictional event actually did occur. If West report was accurate, this was not the failure agency officials described in 1977. Quite the opposite. It was in fact the central ambition of the MK Ultra operation, the means of gaining the ability to seize the control of a person’s perceptions, memories, and ultimately their behavior.
But there was still one more discovery, and this time I found it in the National Security Archives at George Washington University. the official repository of the CIA’s MK Ultra records, which were released to Congress after the 1977 hearings. In those holdings was a different versions of West 1956 report. The original paper had been replaced by a four-page summary that did not exist in West files and appears to have been written by someone else. Here his claims about replacing memories were gone. in their place was a theoretical discussion of LSD and disassociative states. The versions supplied to Congress concluded that the effects of LSD and similar drugs on disassociative states had, and I’m quoting, never been studied. Never been studied. In the original report, West discusses observations from his own experiments, including detailed descriptions of using LSD to, as he wrote, speed the induction of the hypnotic state and deepen the trance in subjects. Those passages have been removed in the report turned over to Congress. The discrepancy could not have been more stark. Nearly 50 years ago, another congressional committee believed it had been given the truth about MK Ultra. It had not. In conclusion, I respectfully submit that these records, some newly available, and others that remained outside the government’s disclosure for decades, weren’t a thorough re-examination of what the program accomplished, what Congress was told, and what may still remain hidden. I’m happy to provide the documents I’ve referenced today and I’ve provided many additional details in my written testimony.
Dr Elizabeth Ginexi opening statement. [BOY is she angry her cushy job got smacked!] I debated on whether or not to add her opening statement since I do not see how it has anything to do with MK Ultra … What is glorious is at 47:20 she gets called out on just that AND Covid.
Chairman Luna, and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I’m a health research scientist with a master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from the George Washington University. I spent 22 years from 2003 to 2025 as a scientific program official at the National Institutes of Health, managing more than $132 million in health research grants and co-authoring 18 federal funding programs. I left the NIH in April of 2025. I’m here today because what is happening to NIH right now is not reform. It is the replacement of scientific judgment with political control. [She is talking about Robert Kennedy]
For 80 years, US federal investment in biomedical research produced outcomes that no private market would have funded. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. NIH funded research on blood pressure, cholesterol, and smoking drove a 56% decline in heart disease between 1950 and 1996. Cancer has been transformed. treatments for breast, lung, prostate, and childhood cancers along with immunotherapies that converted previously fatal diagnoses into manageable conditions traced directly to NIH funded research. HIV AIDS were a death sentence in 1981. No pharmaceutical company saw a profitable market for treatment. NIH ran the trials that no one else would run. The result was antiretroviral therapy and preexposure prophylaxis. Global AIDS deaths have fallen 54% since 2010.
Rare diseases that affect 30 million Americans get studied at the NIH because no market will fund that research. Every dollar that’s appropriated to the National Institutes of Health generates $246 in economic output. NIH supported work contributed to 354 of the 356 new drugs that the FDA approved between 2010 and 2019. Cutting the funding source of that pipeline does not slow it. It ends it. The proposed OM federal financial assistance rule would give political appointees authority to terminate funded grants at any time without cause, including ongoing clinical trials with enrolled patients. This is not a hypothetical. NIH has already terminated or frozen thousands of grants, including hundreds of ongoing clinical trials since January 2025, concentrated in infectious disease, vaccine, and health disparities research. This proposed rule will make that authority permanent. The NIH director has eliminated the merit score thresholds that once protected peer review and political appointees are right now overriding peer review outcomes to screen grants for alignment with administrative pri priorities.
The proposed OM rule will also severely restrict international research. We’re managing an H5N1 blue bird flu outbreak that has more than 70 documented human cases. We recently concluded a hivirus response that required CDC scientists working alongside Argentine counterparts. The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is now the third largest on record and is outpacing containment efforts. This rule will curtail exactly that kind of cooperation that we need. NIH lost 1,112 PhD trained workers from 2025 to early 26. More than half of the NIH institutes right now are operating without permanent scientific leadership. The majority of its advisory councils required by statute to provide independent oversight have lost more than half of their members. The fundamental choice before this Congress is between a system where scientists make scientific judgments through accountable processes and one where political appointees make those calls instead. That choice will determine whether the next breakthroughs in cancer, Alzheimer’s, antibiotic resistance, and pandemic defense will happen here, somewhere else, or perhaps not at all. I urge this committee to support a joint resolution of disapproval to block the proposed OM financial assistance rule. that authority to replace peer review with political approval has not been granted by Congress…
This is a congressional hearing that is worth checking out.
